Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday December 15, 2011 @02:40PM
from the great-and-powerful-oz dept.

helix2301 writes "Microsoft will be upgrading all Windows XP, Vista and 7 users to the latest IE silently. They are doing this because they have found a large number of non-patched systems. Microsoft pointed out that Chrome and Firefox do this regularly. They will start with Australia and Brazil in January, then go world-wide after they have assured there are no issues."

No, they decided to do it alphabetically. So they spent $13 million conducting market research in which they asked focus groups to name a country that starts with A and another that starts with B. After spending another $4 million running statistical analysis on the results (plus an additional $87 million trying to keep the analysis computers running, since after all they were Windows machines), they came to the conclusion that the ideal A country is Australia and the ideal B country is Brazil. Shortly they will be running a $150 million ad campaign depicting Kermit the Frog and Al Gore traveling from Australia to Brazil.

Brazil I imagine has rather high infection rates, due to the high piracy rates (I'm pretty sure Windows_XP_NoWGA_+_Keygen.torrent doesn't have all the patches slipstreamed in).

Australia is probably just because if the inhabitants can handle thousands of incredibly toxic spiders, scorpions, snakes, fish, and even exploding trees, they can probably handle a browser that's slightly more broken than normal.

Brazil I imagine has rather high infection rates, due to the high piracy rates (I'm pretty sure Windows_XP_NoWGA_+_Keygen.torrent doesn't have all the patches slipstreamed in).

Australia is probably just because if the inhabitants can handle thousands of incredibly toxic spiders, scorpions, snakes, fish, and even exploding trees, they can probably handle a browser that's slightly more broken than normal.

"Crikey! This is a really dangerous virus on our computer! I'm going to try to take it by the tail and drag it out of the drive so you can see it. That's quite a magnificient beast, isn't it? Look how it hooks in between layers and takes advantage of vulnerabilities. OK, letting it go again. Watch yer selves!"

<quote><blockquote><div><p>They will start with Australia and Brazil in January, then go world-wide after they have <strong>assured there are no issues</strong>.</p></div></blockquote><p>Haha, I guess a big thanks goes out to Australia and Brazil for being the beta testers. Thanks!</p></quote>

I think Microsoft might want to reconsider the order. Having a country filled with the deadliest snakes and spiders in the world be the alpha testers is NOT a smart move. Worse, Paul Hogan and Rolf Harris might release a celebrity protest song.

Yes, but really it's time this happened. Microsoft finally has a half way decent browser, it's been 18 months since IE6 and 7 were end of life'd, there is no reason for people to still be running on IE6/7 other then organizations being too stubborn or bureaucratic to make their stuff work on the new. The last project I was on we as a team of 8 devs + project manager and two testers spent weeks making the app backward compatible with IE6 just because there was other stuff that they refused to fix that only

If lazy geeks could be bothered to write the cost benefit analysis required to get rid of IE6/7 it would have been long gone. However shrieking about it on a web forum and ignoring the perfectly valid business case of 'it does what we want it to' accomplishes precisely zero.

...Or it's me, who long ago told WinUpdate to never attempt to "upgrade" IE, for the simple fact that I was never ever going to use IE (except to download FIrefox).

Every time Micros~1 updates IE, they fsck around with the defaults -- incorrectly, of course -- and I have to dive through half a dozen panes of preferences settings to bludgeon the thing back into submission. So, no, Micros~1, leave the damned thing alone.

(I also long ago uninstalled MSIE which, for some inane reason, is distinct from IE.)

Unfortunately, Microsoft chose not to support IE9 on Windows XP, so we're going to be stuck with IE8 for quite some time yet.

Mind you, this is still cause for some celebration, as IE8 represents major improvement over its predecessors. But it's not the fundamental fix to the Web that an update to IE9 would be. When Microsoft swallows its pride and ports it (or puts XP support into IE10), that will be cause for dancing in the streets.

So far, I'm found a few XP and Windows7 PC that automatically install and schedule a reboot regardless of your Automatic Update settings. For some reason, MS decided to override this policy with some super-secret update policy I've never seen before. This would be the first time I've noticed it. These machines are always update to date each month and some are on a domain while others in workgroup mode. Anyways, the updates that got push out this week will prompt a user every 15 minutes to reboot. It's like a dead man's switch. If you ignore the option to postpone the reboot, it does it on it's own.

I smell a lawsuit coming for loss of user data that hand't had a chance to be saved while open on the desktop.

If you've got machines on a domain that aren't properly configured to a) Update automatically from an internally managed WSUS server on a regular basis and b) Set to suppress and/or reschedule automatic restarts out of working hours then frankly you deserve any data loss you get.

Hmmm. When using a WSUS server, the behaviour you describe is typical of an update with a deadline. I suppose it is possible that someone at MS inadvertently configured a deadline on one of the WU updates.

While I'm ok with this as an end user and I actively use chrome at home so I'm used to this, I can't help but wonder if this is going to either be a godsend or nightmare for the enterprise IT crowd. However, the shop I work in is fairly good about letting go of things such as the infamous IE6 and we've had very little issues with the latest.

Any enterprise IT department worthy of continued employment will be running all Windows updates through their own WSUS server anyway and so will be free to leave their XP clients running IE6 if they so desire.

Godsend longterm, but nightmate short term. XP really is an inappropriate os to use in 2011. No aslr, dep for all services, trim command, html 5, uac, default admin write, usb 3, the list goes on.

Even firefox and chrome run without dep, aslr, and other security features in XP. Management does not know this.

Upgrading an intranet to IE 8 will make it work in any future version of IE. All these things will make it a dream at work, but a nightmare for the bean counters and CFOs who are ignorant and demand the

IE 6 is a very, very different browser from IE 9. We've had plenty of clients who can't move off IE 6 (or are in the middle of a large project to do so) because it's the only one that will run their Intranet site correctly. I've seen MS make this type of mistake before - they don't see many public-facing sites using a technology, so they feel safe getting rid of it. Well, yes, very few public-facing sites are going to use crazy IE specific stuff, and most are (by now) going to be making reasonable efforts to work between browsers.

Intranet sites are a whole other kettle of fish; corporate programmers often target a single browser - and for many of them, that was IE for a long time. They got away with that from IE 4 to IE 6 because MS just added stuff. With IE 7 and, particularly, Vista, they started fixing insecure and non-standard behaviors - and that's part of why so many companies are still on XP and IE 6.

If MS does this, there will be a lot of pissed off people and gnashing of teeth. I'm not saying it's the wrong choice but "once they've assured there's no issues" sounds pretty silly.

Many companies have lax or no update control, and many allow logins from home computers and what not. People will end up in a version they didn't mean to get and that will create work for other people.

Not end of the world, and again I'm not saying the decision's wrong - I just think they're crazy if they don't expect some significant problems and complaints.

To be fair, the situation looked a lot different in 1998. I mean, look at what web standards defined in 1998 (almost nothing) vs. what managers demanded from these web applications (pretty much everything we have now, plus some other stuff).

So say you want a page that can update dynamically? What are you going to tell your manager: wait for some more tech to be invented and put into a standard? OK, fine - we'll just sit out for 5 years while we get trampled.

I think you have a point. I wasn't looking back as far as to 1998, my bad. By the way, that was the year of IE5 and Netscape 4.

The dynamic you describe is real and happens all the time. Anyway, we're writing about web applications for an intranet so the case for native applications was not so desperate. Furthermore managers and developers should have started re-writing them in a cross browser way somewhere in the early 2000s, at worst in 2004 when Firefox was launched and gained traction among developers o

While the benefits of upgrading are numerous, we recognize that some organizations and individuals may want to opt-out and set their own upgrade pace. One of the things we’re committed to as we move to auto updates is striking the right balance for consumers and enterprises – getting consumers the most up-to-date version of their browser while allowing enterprises to update their browsers on their schedule. The Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 Automatic Update Blocker toolkits prevent automatic upgrades of IE for Windows customers who do not want them. Of course, we firmly believe that IE9 is the most compelling browser for business customers, and we want them to make the decision to upgrade at their convenience.

Similarly, customers who have declined previous installations of IE8 or IE9 through Windows Update will not be automatically updated. Customers have the ability to uninstall updates and continue to receive support for the version of IE that came with their copy of Windows. And similar to organizations, consumers can block the update all together and upgrade on their own. Finally, future versions of IE will provide an option in the product for consumers to opt out of automatic upgrading.

So if you opted out before you're not going to get it. And I imagine you'll be able to back track anyway. Also they have "blocker toolkits" so you can really be sure.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all in favor of this -- I want earlier versions of IE to die a thousand silent deaths, but...

This will hurt some large enterprises who have specifically designed certain website features to work only in IE. Older versions of IE tended to have some quirky rendering behaviors and a lot of sites rely on those quirks. Taking the browser directly to the latest IE will render things in IE "Standards" mode which will break some of these sites.

They better read up on how to explicitly set IE rendering modes:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(v=vs.85).aspx

Three ways to do this: 1) do it in the page body with a META tag, 2) do it in the HTTP headers with the X-UA-Compatible header, or 3) push a GPO update to your internal IE clients that forces the browser to render the sites you specify in "IE Compatibility Mode".

I have no problem with this but my main issue is that they bundled C++ 2008 runtimes with IE9... In my office IE9 patched our runtimes and it caused issues with the software we are developing which made it unable to be compiled. I hope for their sakes that they don't do the same thing.

Too bad that they're still not backporting IE9 to XP, which continues to have a massive market share, especially on the corporate desktop. This really annoys me as a web developer, since it means that until after 2014 (when XP support officially ends) we cannot use CSS3 features and SVG images and expect them to work for everyone.

*Yes, I know, graceful degradation. But management wants those nice rounded corners and drop-shadows to appear in IE8, not just Firefox and Chrome. Using css3pie helps a bit, but it's not bug-free, and in many cases special debugging still needs to be done for IE. And I don't know of any effective workaround to display SVGs in IE8 without making everyone download a plugin.

And what browser do you use? Firefox? Chrome? both of those already do this. This is actually a good idea. I know that at both my office and my parents house that if a screen comes up asking them to update, it's *close* "I'll update later"... this will go on until I manually run the updates because they don't want updates taking time away from facebook or shopping online. Automatically updating like this will silently fix issues, which is a good thing for the bulk of the population that still uses IE.

I just got moved up to IE8 at work. It was IE6 for years, moved to 7 in September. That choice is made by the IT department, and they have to confirm that there aren't issues with the various bits of software being run on the Intranet.

Not everyone uses their computers exclusively at home / at a coffee shop.

There's still the issue of the differences between IE 8 and 9. There's a few issues with some of our toolkit that just can't be fixed without forcing IE 9 into IE 8 standards mode. Granted, it's just a matter of sticking a meta tag in the header, but, funilly enough, if you don't make that meta tag the FIRST meta tag, IE 9 throws a MAJOR wobbly and won't execute it, or any of the other command meta tags. And will still run the controls wrongly.

Just for reference, if anyone else has wondered why their code won't work in IE 9 but does in 8, the meta tag is <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE8"/>

it's amazing how many extra tags, conditional comments and js hacks have to be implemented just to accommodate Internet Explorer. And yes, many corporate networks still have 10 year old code that only runs in IE 6, that is the crux of their productivity suite. It's an utter shambles honestly. And MS is entirely to blame.

Yes, this is great in general (assuming they keep aiming for standards compliance)
Personal users benefit, developers benefit, browser competition benefits, etc.

However, I know many Corporations that have in-house applications that can ONLY run on IE6.
Often these legacy apps are extremely important for the company and are non-trivial to update to more recent browser versions. (or, the company does not have the resources to work on this)

For many corp's this will be an IT nightmare.

(however, I mean really, these Co's have had 20 years to upgrade these app and they have chosen not to, so at some point maybe a 'stick' is needed)

IE 6 is a decade old. Three major releases have come out since then. Using "But...but...but they said it would be so awesome!" as an excuse does not quite cut it anymore. IE 7 came out in 2006, and since then at the very latest the writing has been on the wall. And companies are complaining now, another five years later, about how evil Microsoft is? Making a stupid investment once can be excused, we all make mistakes. But they have had more than enough time to move off the Titanic.

I think you fail to realise just how much money has been sunk into these decade old systems.

It's hard to justify spending potentially millions of dollars on an upgrade when:1) The system works now just fine.2) The upgrade does not necessarily add features or make it work any better.3) The entire saga is classed as a discretionary spend.

As for the rest of your post:- Designing a system based around a product of the biggest software company in the world who are leading the internet browsing industry in every factor is in no way a "stupid investment". Heck the fact these systems work now 10 years later is a testament to the good investment it is. Designing a system now with IE6 support would be a stupid investment.- How is IE6 representative of the titanic? The systems work. They continue to work. IE6 continues to run. For the most part subsequent versions of IE even provide dedicated compatibility modes to help keep them running which works well in many cases.

I hate using IE6 at work as much as the next guy but don't come in all high and mighty and pretend you wouldn't have made the same decisions at the time given the information you had at hand. If you did, likely you wouldn't be working at the company anymore.

It took the company I'm working for a kick from microsoft to upgrade from IE6 to IE8. Someone convinced them sharepoint was the product they needed for their intranet, which nolonger supports IE6. 5000 desktops upgraded and internal apps fixed over a period of a year or so

I disagree. Spending time on IE compatibility is usually a necessary evil, but I certainly don't enjoy hacking in fixes and workarounds for "bugs" in perfectly valid code, whether I'm paid for it or not. It's unproductive time, and prevents me from using the best tools and techniques available, instead relying on ugly hacks. There's more to developing a website, for me, than plumping up the invoice with extras and upsells and cashing the check at the end. I want to feel productive, create clean and elegant code, and be proud of the result.

They've actually coded up some horrible hackjob that runs IE6 on Windows 7, rather than fix the horrible in-house app.

Clearly you've never been involved in trying to get rid of an app like that.

It's mission critical, covers a bunch of use-cases that nobody can remember but that are absolutely vital to like two people (but affect millions of dollars of business), and almost nobody who fully understands it is still around. It's impossible to gather requirements because the application has so many exceptions and one-off fixes and tweaks as to make it impossible to know what all it's supposed to do.

I've been on a couple of projects which tried to replace legacy, in-house apps... it's often a very expensive, time-consuming process that leaves you with a solution which does a fraction of what the original did and leaves the users miserable that they've been "upgraded" to a tool which doesn't do the job.

Sadly, once you have that kind of software, the process of getting rid of it is often damned near impossible. At the very least, it can be prohibitively expensive... who wants to spend $40 million to end up with software that does less than what you have now?

Nobody sees it as investing in moving away from old creaky technology, they see it as spending money on something they already have. Hell, I've seen someone go through a multi-year process, tens of millions of dollars, huge amounts of man-power... only to decide that the twenty-year old app that runs on the mainframe is still a better solution because it covers all of their use cases and the users are comfortable with it.

It gets even worse if you try to replace purpose-built with something that does 'most' of what you need. The users won't touch it because they think it's cumbersome, and missing features they can't live without.

Yes, it is short-sighted to not get rid of it, but the sheer cost and amount of pain in ripping it out can make the alternative seem more attractive.

Conversely, if you can actually do a good job and replace their old software with new software that does the job better, you're sorted.

I replaced a monstrous thing that was a custom facade on a UML modeller with integrated CVS handling with a couple of Eclipse plugins, a small Java program and a few shell scripts. Their startup time went from 15 minutes to 60 seconds, all their basic operations are at least an order of magnitude faster, the editor is WYSIWYG instead of having to paste HTML in from Dreamweaver, and it uses autocomplete to place links instead of some horrendous wizard where you have to find the thing you want to link to in a tree view.

They don't even mind that I left a whole bunch of features out, because they were there to compensate for the incredible suckitude of the original solution. The only thing they'd really like is a few more GUI widgets, but they have a good (self-maintained wiki) manual and nice friendly shell scripts and really, the tasks the GUI would be for are a minor part of their work - the bits that consume the time are already wrapped in GUIs. I just view it as a minor anxiety with command lines - a GUI wouldn't make anything more robust, or even easier to use (really - just LOOK easier to use), and it would make things harder to debug when they do go wrong.

Just the savings on not having to pay the support licenses for the horrible proprietary Java CVS server they were using has paid for the time I spent on it, and then some. The increased productivity is just gravy. I get about 1 support call a month for it, usually asking for a change to one of the XSLT sheets because they need their templates updating.

The key is not to look at what the old app does and try to replicate it exactly. If you take a step back and work out what the actual requirements are, you'll end up with a better product that the users actually want. The old application can help considerably with that - usually the thing that frustrates them the most is the thing that wastes most of their time and needs to be made the most streamlined or even automated away. For this app, that was the linking - instead firing up a wizard and making of a whole bunch of clicks in a tree view, you now just type the first few letters, hit ctrl-space, and find the item you wanted to link in a menu with the mouse or keyboard. And you can actually copy and paste the links now, which you couldn't do in the old version.

So there are definitely benefits. Fortunately, the manager of this team could see that. Even better for me, he's now become greatly elevated in the hierarchy, carrying my reputation as a miracle worker with him...

Not the same scale though.. we're talking in the hundreds of thousands rather than tens of millions.

I've been through it too. The truth of the matter is that it can be done, and it's not usually as difficult as the people involved want you to think it is. Truth of the matter is that people hate parting with software they're comfortable with, no matter how much better the newer software is. The trick to it, as with most things is building them a new piece of software that's pretty much exactly like the old one. Build it properly, but don't change the look of the ui, or the workflow, no matter how absolutel

Do we want to call MS Big Brother over this, when they're following the example of Firefox?

IE has been getting a lot better, and the more sane release schedule was becoming more and more of a selling point over Firefox. Funny how the browser field has shifted. It used to be Firefox for the smart people, Opera for the independent smart people, and IE/Safari for the people that didn't really know how computers operated.

Now, IE and Safari have improved, Firefox is squandering it's lead, and Chrome is on par with Firefox, and Opera is still the Ron Paul of browsers. There's no obviously bad browser anymore, but we also don't have an obviously superior browser.

There's no obviously bad browser anymore, but we also don't have an obviously superior browser.

As a developer, I strongly disagree there. IE has the same problems it has always had: everything works in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, & Safari but oh, surprise surprise, it doesn't work in IE. Always have to code something special, even with widely supported Javascript frameworks, there are needed tweaks nearly every time, just for IE.

One thing that makes a difference between FF and IE pushing upgrades, if I have IE6 installed on my machine, it's because there's some horribly written intranet site that will only work in IE6. I'm not saying that every IE6 user can use that excuse, but there exist some number of us for whom it is true. Do they have a way to force a downgrade or install versions side by side?

IE9 is configurable to a compatibility mode so it will operate like IE6 for all or specified websites. Most people do not have the time or the knowledge to get it configured properly though. Microsoft went through a lot of trouble to build this compatibility mode though.

>Do we want to call MS Big Brother over this, when they're following the example of Firefox?

Sure. Firefox isn't integrated into the OS in the way IE is, for starters. And what this means is that I haven't upgraded IE for some time now because it broke one of the widgets I use on my Win7 desktop. Firefox doesn't do that sort of thing, because it can't, so there's not an issue with beaking stuff outside of itself.

I guess I might as well mention while I'm here that I haven't upgraded to the latest Firefox e

What about all the companies that use older versions of IE because of compatibility with their own proprietary web applications?

Simple: they'll disable the automatic update, by force if necessary.

Realistically, though, these users tend to be behind corporate firewalls with lots of antivirus protection and a forced patch schedule, so I doubt Microsoft is too worried about them contributing significantly to continued security holes thanks to IE6. This is an update to save the clueless from themselves.

"While the benefits of upgrading are numerous, we recognize that some organizations and individuals may want to opt-out and set their own upgrade pace. One of the things we’re committed to as we move to auto updates is striking the right balance for consumers and enterprises – getting consumers the most up-to-date version of their browser while allowing enterprises to update their browsers on their schedule. The Internet Explorer 8 and Intern